Hello Amarok developers,

I'm a user of amarok for a such long time now !

But I'm more and more into HD Music (Flac files, often 24bits 192KHz), and unfortunately, Amarok does not propose the choice playing my collection via Alsa, but just pulseaudio ! What a miss !
All my HD music is converted by Pulseaudio... and I finally have a poor quality sound (volume, sample rate and deep...absolutely not bit-perfect).

In the sound configuration, we just have a button to set Phonon. An option should be available to choose other outputs (Alsa devices should be listed here !).

Amarok should not forget that its main function is to play music, so it should propose a way to play it perfectly ! For this reason, I switched to DeadBeef. Its interface is not so easy, there is no collection manager, many things are missing in its interface, but its sound settings is absolutely complete : The sound is Perfect !.

Please, make it possible with my favorite player : Amarok (I might be wrong, but I'm quite sure that adding an direct Alsa output should not be a big pain for developers )

Thank you anyway

Mathojojo

Amarok uses what the system provides, and it is completely out of scope for Amarok to change the system settings: If you don't want to use Pulseaudio, then switch to Alsa only before starting Amarok. It would also not work inside Amarok anyway, because you would have to restart the program (and most likely also the GUI desktop as well) when switching the underlying sound engine.
FWIW: I very much doubt Pulseaudio converts your music, are you sure your settings are correct? Please ask the question in the general Multimedia forum, as that is relevant to the sound engines, not to a specific application.

Mamarok wrote:Amarok uses what the system provides, and it is completely out of scope for Amarok to change the system settings: If you don't want to use Pulseaudio, then switch to Alsa only before starting Amarok. It would also not work inside Amarok anyway, because you would have to restart the program (and most likely also the GUI desktop as well) when switching the underlying sound engine.
FWIW: I very much doubt Pulseaudio converts your music, are you sure your settings are correct? Please ask the question in the general Multimedia forum, as that is relevant to the sound engines, not to a specific application.

Modern computers have to be able to play more than 1 source at a time, even if the sources have different properties, like different sample rates. The sound hardware (the audio card) has to synchronize its clock with the source to correctly render the sound. So if the computer is playing a 16bit 48KHz, the sound card will set its own clock to the same ! But if the computer has to play 2 sounds (or more) in the same time and with different clock properties,, the sound card will not know what to do.

That's why pulseaudio exists. Pulseaudio is a server, claiming itself to be the sound card. As a sound card, it receives the multiple stream of the differents sounds played, mixes them in one stream with unique properties (mostly 16bit 48Khz, but it can be changed). This new stream can then be streamed to the real sound card via the Alsa drivers.
So yes, in my example, any sound stream different of 16bit 48kHz will be resampled for sure ! As an audiophile user, I don't want my beautiful HD Music to be destroyed when played. It's like if you were looking an UHD Blu-ray video on an old low resolution TV !!! As I said, Amarok's main and only purpose is to play music. It should give the user the option to do it perfectly, and with total respect of the sound! If not, we don't really need it, Youtube can play it as well...

You said :

Amarok uses what the system provides, and it is completely out of scope for Amarok to change the system settings: If you don't want to use Pulseaudio, then switch to Alsa

I agree. But in our case, all already exists! Alsa exists and is installed and provided on every systems (Pulseaudio need Alsa to talk with the hardware). Amarok has just to give user the choice of streaming the music directly to the ALSA driver (no other sound will be able to be played in the system in this case), or via the Pulseaudio server (other sounds will be played correctly in this other case). This is as simple as that, nothing to change in system settings...


As I said, DeadBeef do it, without changing the system settings :


Thank you to consider it at least.